Matt Damon wears a Hamilton Khaki Navy

Late in The Martian, about three-quarters of the way through, the camera pushes in for a long look at Mark Watney's wrist: a slab of black metal strapped over the sleeve of a Mars suit. Matt Damon plays Watney, the NASA astronaut left behind on Mars after his crew evacuates in a dust storm, certain he is dead. He survives by arithmetic, growing food, rationing power, working out trajectories by hand.

The watch is a Hamilton Khaki Navy BeLOWZERO, reference H78585333. It is a dive watch, and not a modest one: a 46mm case in black PVD steel, water-resistant to a thousand meters, with a helium escape valve and a sapphire crystal built to take the pressure. Hamilton did not make it for the film. When Ridley Scott's team went looking for something tough, they paged through Hamilton's catalog and the BeLOWZERO's blacked-out look fit the picture. It is a real watch you can still buy, around 1,800 dollars.

So Watney spends the movie in a thousand-meter dive watch on a planet with no ocean and almost no air. The helium valve and the deep-water seal are dead weight on Mars. The part that still works is ordinary: by Hamilton's own account, the BeLOWZERO kept Watney apprised of the time back on Earth. The company has been turning up in films like this for a long time, hundreds of them since its Art Deco dial appeared in Shanghai Express in 1932.